I keep hearing from supporters of other GOP candidates that Ted Cruz can’t win the general election because he is too conservative and too preachy. These same people criticize him for not being authentically conservative and also support others who are preachy.

I have long lamented the conventional wisdom, swallowed whole by many nominally conservative Republicans, that a true-blue consistent conservative can’t win a general presidential election because he can’t attract moderates, centrists, independents, Perotistas, Trumpsters, disaffected Democrats and certainly not women or minorities.

Why is that the accepted thinking, when Ronald Reagan won in two landslides and the moderate GOP presidential candidates from George H.W. Bush to John McCain to Mitt Romney lost? George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism barely won in 2000.

Would someone please have the guts to tell me in what ways Ted Cruz is too conservative? What does that even mean?

Is your objection that he is socially conservative as well as an economic and foreign policy conservative? Hallelujah! So was Ronald Reagan. Remember his three-legged stool?

We hear from Trump supporters that Ted Cruz is not likable or electable and that he’s an opportunistic follower of Donald Trump on the immigration issue. Thus they’ll support the more likable, electable, real-deal immigration hawk.

But polls say otherwise. They indicate that both Cruz and Rubio could beat Hillary Clinton but that Trump would have more difficulty, probably because of his astronomical unfavorability ratings. The charge that Cruz is in the Trump slipstream on immigration is bunk as well. Cruz was fighting in the trenches on immigration before Trump brought his megaphone to the issue — a megaphone we nevertheless appreciate — and Cruz remains a more reliable bet on the borders and amnesty.

I repeat the question: How is Ted Cruz too conservative? Don’t you really mean that Cruz is too committed to his principles, that he will actually fight against the establishment and thus he is a thorn in their side?

I hadn’t seen this friend for years when I ran into him recently at the mall. “The end is near,” was the first thing he said.

I didn’t know if he was talking about ISIS or if he thought we’re all going to float away due to a planetary heating that’s irreversible and catastrophic.

Happily, he was only referring to a calendar.

“Upstairs in the calendar store, a few doors from Victoria’s Secret,” he explained, “there’s a good Obama countdown calendar.”

I went upstairs to look for a whole store devoted exclusively to calendars. It’s funny how entire shops are now specializing in fewer and fewer things. If edible pot is legalized in Pennsylvania, I won’t be surprised if we end up with a “High as @(%!” marijuana candy store in the local mall that carries only one item — “Mary Jane and Blunt, America’s best white chocolate polar bear couple.”

In any case, right between the dog calendars and wartime calendars featuring American military jets was the “Yes, the end is near” Obama calendar – “The out-of-office countdown, 2016 through the glorious end! January 20, 2017,” featuring some of President Obama’s most memorable policy and ideological declarations:

Back in April, shortly after the framework of the Iran nuclear deal was established, President Obama proclaimed in the Rose Garden, “If Iran violates the deal, sanctions can be snapped back into place.”

I want to underscore: If Iran fails in a material way to live up to these commitments, then the United States, the E.U., and even the U.N. sanctions that initially brought Iran to the table can and will snap right back into place. We have a specific provision in this agreement called ‘snapback’ for the return of those sanctions in the event of noncompliance.

So if violating the arms embargo or restrictions on its missile program aren’t grounds for snapping back sanctions against Iran, then what is? What breach does Iran have to commit to begin the snapback process?

WASHINGTON—An internal government review found that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent at least four emails from her personal account containing classified information during her time heading the State Department.

In a letter to members of Congress on Thursday, the inspector general of the intelligence community concluded that Mrs. Clinton’s email contains material from the intelligence community that should have been considered “secret”—the second-highest level of classification—at the time it was sent. A copy of the letter to Congress was provided to The Wall Street Journal by a spokeswoman for the inspector general.

As a result of the findings, the inspector general referred the matter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counterintelligence division. An official with the Department of Justice said Friday that it had received a referral to open an investigation into the potential mishandling of classified information. Initially, a Justice Department official said Friday morning the investigation was criminal in nature, but the department reversed course hours later without explanation.

“The department has received a referral related to the potential compromise of classified information. It is not a criminal referral,” an official said.

Appearing on CNN, Bill Clinton claims that the millions the Clintons made from speeches paid for by foreign individuals and entities who had business before Hillary’s State Department were innocent and coincidental.

“[Hillary] was pretty busy those years,” Clinton said. “I never saw her study a list of my contributors, and I had no idea who was doing business before the State Department.”

Bill added: “No one has ever asked me for anything…I never thought about whether there was any overlap.”

Besides, as Bill explained, in a Bloomberg interview last week, “Has anybody proved that we did anything objectionable? No.”

Well, there you have it. Everything is on the up-and-up. Americans should just move along.

But they can’t. And they won’t. Not until, that is, Hillary Clinton begins explaining her myriad conflicts of interest in granular detail, especially since there are no e-mails or server to corroborate Bill’s claims of her innocence.

Indeed, save for a generic response to a generic question on the topic, Hillary Clinton has yet to answer a single question about “Clinton Cash.”

For example, Hillary hasn’t explained why her State Department approved the transfer of 20% of US uranium to the Russian government — even as her family foundation hauled in $145 million from investors in the deal, and Bill received $500,000 from a Kremlin-backed bank for a speech in Moscow.

Hillary has yet to explain why there was no conflict of interest in allowing top investors in the Keystone XL pipeline to pay her husband $1.8 million to deliver 10 speeches, even as she quietly shepherded an environmental impact study through her State Department that proved largely supportive of the pipeline.

Nor has Hillary explained why she violated the memorandum of understanding she signed with the Obama administration promising to disclose all donors, including the foreign head of the Russian government’s Uranium One, Ian Telfer, who funneled four donations totaling $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation that were never revealed.

Or the 2 million shares of stock foreign mining magnate Stephen Dattels gave the Clinton Foundation, even as Hillary’s State Department allowed “open pit coal mining” in Bangladesh, where Dattels’ Polo Resources had a stake.

As Sunlight Foundation senior fellow Bill Allison told The Post, “It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons.”

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) committed two high political offenses against the Republican establishment this past week, causing some party leaders and bloggers to attack Senator Paul’s motives and engage in some old-fashioned fear mongering.

He told the truth — twice.

Rand Paul told the truth about how a “shoot first, ask questions later” foreign policy does not work.

And he told the truth about the Bush/Obama NSA spying program.

First, Rand Paul dared to expose some awful foreign policy decisions by both President George W. Bush and Barack Obama that many hawkish Republicans still support.

Sen. Paul was asked on MSNBC’s Morning Joe how he would react to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) arguing that ISIS exists because of Sen. Paul’s restrained view of foreign policy.

Paul reacted by arguing “it’s exactly the opposite” because “the hawks in our party wanted to bomb Assad, which would have made ISIS’ job even easier.” The presidential aspirant went on to say that Republican supporters of Hillary’s war caused “Libya (to be a) failed state and a disaster.” These are critiques of two decisions by President Obama that many so called hawkish Republicans like Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Graham rushed to support.

How convenient that the State Department dumps this on the Friday before Memorial Day.

Just in time for the long, three-day, kick-off to summer Memorial Day weekend, the State Department has released the first round of emails belonging to former Secretary Hillary Clinton. There are just under 300 of them. I would post some of the documents here, but the page on State.gov hosting them is down (naturally). UPDATE: Back up. You can read the emails here.

Although the emails reportedly cover the time period when the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was attacked on 9/11/2012, State Department Deputy Press Secretary Marie Harf insists the emails contain no new information.

The State Department announced plans earlier this week the rest of Clinton’s emails, which were hosted on a personal server before they were deleted, should be reviewed and released by January 2016.

WASHINGTON — In a dramatic assessment of the domestic threat posed by the Islamic State, FBI Director James Comey said Thursday there are “hundreds, maybe thousands” of people across the country who are receiving recruitment overtures from the terrorist group or directives to attack the U.S.

Comey said the Islamic State, also known as ISIL, is leveraging social media in unprecedented ways through Twitter and other platforms, directing messages to the smartphones of “disturbed people” who could be pushed to launch assaults on U.S. targets.

“It’s like the devil sitting on their shoulders, saying ‘kill, kill, kill,”’ Comey said in a meeting with reporters.

The FBI director’s comments come in the midst of a federal investigation into a foiled attack in Garland, Texas, involving two ISIL sympathizers, one of whom, Elton Simpson, was long known to federal authorities.

Comey said Thursday that hours before the attempted Garland attack, FBI agents sent a bulletin to local authorities indicating that Simpson may have been interested in traveling there from Phoenix to attend the conference featuring controversial cartoon depictions of the prophet Mohammed. At the time, Comey said, agents did not have specific information that Simpson had targeted the meeting.

The 30-year-old Simpson and associate Nadir Soofi, 34, were fatally shot by a police officer Sunday night after the pair launched a bungled attack on the conference.